Digging (through to) China

Kudos to the UC Irvine History Department for creating The China Beat, a blog about contemporary China that is regularly updated with pithy blog posts with concise descriptions of scholarly projects, films, books, blogs, current events, digital cultural practices, and conferences about China.

Launched in early 2008, The China Beat provides context and criticism on contemporary China from China scholars and journalists. Based around a group of active contributors at the University of California, Irvine, including co-founders Kenneth Pomeranz and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the blog draws on a global group of China watchers in the U.S., China, the U.K., Australia, Japan, Canada, Taiwan, and many other locations.

With the UCI Outreach program to K-12 educators, the UC Irvine History Project, the group has also created a great resource list of blogs for classroom use.

End Game China

A New York Times article about how "China's Censors Tackle and Trip over the Internet" presents a more complex view of how Internet censorship operates in the country than many of the stories about Google, China, and restrictions on free speech that have appeared in the media during the last year. The team of reporters who produced this investigative piece explain the role in managing popular opinion of large labor pools of human minders who spread counter-propaganda and patriotic messages in detail, They also provide more context for automatically generated high-tech solutions that often prove too dumb to be effective, as in the case of software that filters out queries based on the Chinese word for "carrot" out of fear that computer users will find subversive materials about China's president, whose name uses the same character as this common word. The story also notes that China's censorship brigades "are increasingly a model for countries around the world that want to control an unrestricted Internet."

Today, China censors everything from the traditional print press to domestic and foreign Internet sites; from cellphone text messages to social networking services; from online chat rooms to blogs, films and e-mail. It even censors online games.

That’s not all. Not content merely to block dissonant views, the government increasingly employs agents to peddle its views online, in the guise of impartial bloggers and chat-room denizens. And increasingly, it is backing state-friendly clones of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, all Western sites that have been blocked here for roughly a year.

The government’s strategy, according to Mr. Bandurski and others, is not just to block unflattering messages, but to overwhelm them with its own positive spin and rebuttals.

The government makes no apologies for what it calls “guiding public opinion.” Regulation is crucial, it says, to keep China from sliding into chaos and to preserve the party’s monopoly on power.

“Whether we can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information, and the stability of the state,” President Hu said in 2007.

In China’s view, events since then — including the online spread of the democracy manifesto known as Charter 08 and riots in the Tibet and Xinjiang regions, said to be aided by cellphone and Internet communications — have only reinforced that stance.

In the last year, censorship has increased markedly, as evidenced by the closing of thousands of blogs and Web sites in ostensible anti-pornography campaigns, and the jailing of prominent dissidents who used the Internet to spread their views. The departure of Google’s search engine in March only capped months of growing intolerance of unfettered speech.

The paradox — at least at first glance — is that even with such pervasive restraints, China’s press and Internet are capable of freewheeling discourse and social criticism.

The Fifth Freedom

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Remarks on Internet Freedom is a remarkable piece of official rhetoric about computational culture that emphasizes familiar themes of freedom, transformation, novelty, interconnectedness, information flow, and entrepreneurship.

What is also striking about the speech is the way that it never mentions the word "Google," even though its direct address to the Chinese government clearly takes the side of the Mountain View, California company in adopting the search engine corporation's complaints about unfair business practices and vulnerable computer networks that are central aspects of its ultimatum to Beijing. In contrast, Clinton avoids the language of brinksmanship in her statement and instead emphasizes global universalism rather than two-sided confrontation in her speech.

The spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet. When something happens in Haiti or Hunan, the rest of us learn about it in real time – from real people. And we can respond in real time as well. Americans eager to help in the aftermath of a disaster and the girl trapped in the supermarket are connected in ways that were not even imagined a year ago, even a generation ago. That same principle applies to almost all of humanity today. As we sit here, any of you – or maybe more likely, any of our children – can take out the tools that many carry every day and transmit this discussion to billions across the world.

Now, in many respects, information has never been so free. There are more ways to spread more ideas to more people than at any moment in history. And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.

During his visit to China in November, for example, President Obama held a town hall meeting with an online component to highlight the importance of the internet. In response to a question that was sent in over the internet, he defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens hold their own governments accountable, generates new ideas, encourages creativity and entrepreneurship. The United States belief in that ground truth is what brings me here today.

Because amid this unprecedented surge in connectivity, we must also recognize that these technologies are not an unmitigated blessing. These tools are also being exploited to undermine human progress and political rights. Just as steel can be used to build hospitals or machine guns, or nuclear power can either energize a city or destroy it, modern information networks and the technologies they support can be harnessed for good or for ill. The same networks that help organize movements for freedom also enable al-Qaida to spew hatred and incite violence against the innocent. And technologies with the potential to open up access to government and promote transparency can also be hijacked by governments to crush dissent and deny human rights.

In the last year, we’ve seen a spike in threats to the free flow of information. China, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan have stepped up their censorship of the internet. In Vietnam, access to popular social networking sites has suddenly disappeared. And last Friday in Egypt, 30 bloggers and activists were detained. One member of this group, Bassem Samir, who is thankfully no longer in prison, is with us today. So while it is clear that the spread of these technologies is transforming our world, it is still unclear how that transformation will affect the human rights and the human welfare of the world’s population.

On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it. Now, this challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic. The words of the First Amendment to our Constitution are carved in 50 tons of Tennessee marble on the front of this building. And every generation of Americans has worked to protect the values etched in that stone.

Franklin Roosevelt built on these ideas when he delivered his Four Freedoms speech in 1941. Now, at the time, Americans faced a cavalcade of crises and a crisis of confidence. But the vision of a world in which all people enjoyed freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear transcended the troubles of his day. And years later, one of my heroes, Eleanor Roosevelt, worked to have these principles adopted as a cornerstone of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They have provided a lodestar to every succeeding generation, guiding us, galvanizing us, and enabling us to move forward in the face of uncertainty.

As "Clinton unveils U.S. policy on Internet freedom" makes clear, the rhetoric borrows from FDR's oratory against expanding totalitarianism by adding a fifth freedom about access to computer networks and secure data that wasn't part of the Roosevelt administration's agenda.

I have to point out, however, that choice of focusing on digital "freedom" rather than digital "rights" is significant, particularly given how digital rights could become a way to build coalitions and move policy.

There is already response to the speech registering on Chinese editorial pages, which names Google specifically. It is interesting to see how state-sanctioned opinion pieces like "The real stake in 'free flow of information'" use anti-Google pro-nationalist language about "information imperialism," which is similar to that used in countries such as France, as well as an opposition between "democracy" and the "free flow of information" that Europeans might be less likely to adopt.

The hard fact that Clinton has failed to highlight in her speech is that bulk of the information flowing from the US and other Western countries is loaded with aggressive rhetoric against those countries that do not follow their lead.

In contrast, in the global information order, countries that are disadvantaged could not produce the massive flow of information required, and could never rival the Western countries in terms of information control and dissemination.

Keeping that in mind, it must be realized that when it comes to information content, quantity, direction and flow, there is absolutely no equality and fairness.

The online freedom of unrestricted access is, thus, only one-way traffic, contrary to the spirit of democracy and calculated to strengthen a monopoly.

Countries disadvantaged by the unequal and undemocratic information flow have to protect their national interest, and take steps toward this. This is essential for their political stability as well as normal conduct of economic and social life.

These facts about the difficulties of developing nations, though understood by politicians like Clinton, are not communicated to the people of Western countries. Instead, those politicians publicize and pursue their claims purely from a Western standpoint.

This practice is morally unworthy and has been resisted by intellectuals in developing countries.

Take Google's threat to pull out of China for example. It has stirred widespread debate among the public in China. The recent poll conducted by huanqiu.com shows a growing number of people voicing opposition to an unregulated or uncensored Google in China. As many as 81 percent of those polled are opposed to Chinese government accepting Google's demands.

It is not because the people of China do not want free flow of information or unlimited access to Internet, as in the West. It is just because they recognize the situation that their country is forced to face.

Unlike advanced Western countries, Chinese society is still vulnerable to the effect of multifarious information flowing in, especially when it is for creating disorder.

Western countries have long indoctrinated non-Western nations on the issue of freedom of speech. It is an aggressive political and diplomatic strategy, rather than a desire for moral values, that has led them to do so.

The free flow of information is an universal value treasured in all nations, including China, but the US government's ideological imposition is unacceptable and, for that reason, will not be allowed to succeed.

China's real stake in the "free flow of information" is evident in its refusal to be victimized by information imperialism.

Showdown in Beijing

Virtualpolitik pal Siva Vaidhyanathan was a big part of today's big digital rhetoric story, and he has been posting his reflections about the showdown between the search engine Google and the government of China on his Googlization of Everything blog. Although the Los Angeles Times is trumpeting the idea that "Chinese Internet users praise Google's threat to exit," the New York Times summed up their more skeptical assessment with the headline "Google's Threat Echoed Everywhere Except China."

Much of what Vaidhyanathan is doing in his blog postings and interviews like this radio interview is clarifying two misconceptions that are common here in the U.S. where 1) we don't imagine Google not to be ubiquitous anywhere else, and 2) we still accept the Bush administration's view that privacy and security is a zero-sum game. First, Vaidhyanathan points out that Google has a much smaller market share than native-born search engine Baidu, which offers access its users access to more copyrighted works than the litigation-averse Mountain View company that must abide by U.S. law. Second, Google is citing both threats to its business model and to civil liberties in explaining its risky ultimatum.

Vaidhyanathan has been working out his general "thoughts on China" for a long time, certainly before the attention paid to Google's shift in policy and its recent threat to pull out of the country entirely, if it doesn't get its way. As he explains, however," in his statement on Google's concerns about "Cyber Attack," American news organizations have been overemphasizing the human rights rhetoric in their coverage: "It's commercial malpractice to back out of the largest market in the world on principle. Google must have some good business reasons."

Certainly the rhetoric on Google's official blog about "a new approach to China" uses the language of selflessness that often appears in its official communications to explain its dare to China:

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

In one case, Google claims to be defending the interest of other U.S. companies and Western caitalism, and in the other it emphasizes the risk to democracy and human rights advocates of Chinese interference in network security, although it acknowledges that there are only two cases it can points to, both of them relatively minor.

Perhaps the most interesting question is the one being asked by Rebecca MacKinnon: "Will Google stand up to France and Italy, too?"

A Dam Shame

As an opponent of current copyright law in the digital era and of the ideology that children need to be blocked from the Internet as well, I have to admit that there are sometimes moments in which I can relish certain characteristics of my opponents under the current regime and their tenacious litigiousness.

The New York Times has just reported that "Chinese Firms Accused of Stealing Code" are being sued by the U.S. maker of the "Cybersitter" software, which accuses contractors for the authoritarian regime of pirating over three thousand lines of code to produce the controversial "Green Dam Youth Escort" software that also limited access to pro-democracy or pro-human rights sites.

From my conversations with colleagues who are computer scientists, I have to say that that sounds like a lot of code to have been lifted wholesale. On their programming assignments, students often receive failing grades for borrowing just a few lines, which one friend compares to "giving the same answer to a question about 'how I spent my summer vacation'" as someone else in its obviousness.

The best part is that the Cybersitter company is also suing U.S. manufacturers who kowtowed to the Chinese in exchange for market share by agreeing to install their anti-free-speech software product on all new machines.

Crash and Burn

I've written before about video re-enactments that use 3D animation software in news broadcasts and retask technologies often used in courtrooms to attempt to represent what happened in automobile accidents and other catalysts for litigation.

News broadcasters now use these simulations for recreating accidents and violent events like school shootings or military mistakes when footage illustrating the actual encounter is unobtainable. Now Chinese news footage that uses an animation engine to restage the middle-of-the-night car crash/infidelity argument involving pro-golfer Tiger Woods and his wife. See below for Keith Olberman's prediction that this will be a genre increasingly likely to appear in news broadcasts.

Update:For more on this story, check out "In Animated Videos, News and Guesswork Mix" in the New York Times.

Detective Mechandise

Mandatory installation of the screening software Green Dam on all computers sold in China after July 1 has now prompted a copyright claim from Solid Oak, the maker of the CyberSitter filtering program.

Many U.S. companies have been cooperating with the Beijing government to ensure continued lucrative contracts with the huge Chinese market, but the Obama administration has apparently sent a letter protesting the initiative on human rights grounds. The letter has not been publicly released, but a statement, "Secretary Gary Locke and USTR Ron Kirk Call on China To Revoke Mandatory Internet Filtering Software," seems to make the tone of protest clear.

Surf No Evil

I thought there was some irony to the fact that National Public Radio aired a story about "Parental Controls for Computer-Savvy Kids" and then shortly afterward aired a story about how "China's Gay Pride Week Mixes Celebration, Caution," which noted with disapproval that computers shipped after July 1st would be equipped with an Internet filter that screens out content from keywords related to terms like "homosexual" and that such events would be therefore difficult to publicize in the future. NPR's producers obviously didn't see any cognitive dissonance that would come from this juxtaposition, but let me suggest a few ways that this should have given listeners a pause.

First of all, Henry Jenkins is running an interesting series on Risks, Rights, and Responsibilities in the Digital Age: An Interview with Sonia Livingstone (Part One) that cautions against moral panics and forms of rhetoric that make children's rights very different from human rights by stripping kids of certain forms of agency.

Second, as David Coursey points out in "China's Citizens Oppose Green Dam, So Must U.S. Computer Makers," many technology firms are complicit with the requirement that Green Dam be installed on new PCs.

For a fascinating write-up on resistance to Green Dam, including screen shots from what turned out to be an Internet voting fiasco for the Chinese government, see Rebecca MacKinnon's post "Green Damned."

Update: More about the "Green Dam Phenomenon" from MacKinnon at the Wall Street Journal.

Misfortune Cookie Messages

With the rise of text-centered microblogging around the world, political dissidents have faced challenged when feeds are automatically filtered. Today, with the twentieth anniversary of the massacre of students and other civilians in Tiananmen Square being remembered around the world, users of such sites have resorted to ingenious strategies.

Rebecca MacKinnon covers circumvention strategies and government crackdowns on particular social network sites in "China blocks Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Hotmail, Windows Live, etc. ahead of Tiananmen 20th anniversary" On Twitter, where "#june4" was blocked, users resorted to "#may35." This New York Times graphic explains other strategies used on Fanfou.com to evade deletion of messages by censors.

Last Tango in Beijing

This how-to video shows political resisters how to do a subversive dance step, the "Tank Man Tango," to commemorate the ballet that took place two decades earlier and became frozen into an iconic image, albeit one for which collective memory can be altered by Photoshop. You can see the footage of the original "Tiananmen Tango" here.

(Thanks to Peggy Weil for the link!)

Update: Nedra Weinreich provides a link to the Lens blog from the New York Times, which shows another angle on the tank man.

The Whole World is Still Watching

Now, with the twentieth anniversary of the killing of protesting students upon us, the digital archives at the Tienanmen Beijing Massacre Archive are well worth visiting in the name of collective memory as it continues to be expressed on the web.

Search and Seizure

Gaaagle presents a web page that appears to be a Google-style search engine box where the title is covered with a blindfold and the query area is filled with the following words: "No to free speech. Yes to censorship. Money talks. Truth is silenced." The buttons for both "Gaaagle Search" and "I'm Feeling Gaaaggled" lead to the Gaaagle blog, which protests how the company has caved to the Chinese government in limiting the human rights information that are disseminated through its search engine.

Cutaway View

The strata-cut style of animation by David Daniels would seem to be very different from digital animation techniques that are driven by software rather than physical materials, but Daniels' animation is achieving attention again long after his heyday doing rock videos in the nineties. (I have owned a slice of Daniels work for many years, which has hung on our walls.) Now Amnesty International leads off its animated version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the United Nations with Daniels' footage.

Hoping to capitalize on post-Olympics interest, they've also made a Chinese-language version of the film for online dissemination. It's worth noting that Amnesty's once bare bones Chinese language page has now been replaced by the China Debate. Users are also encouraged to download lesson plans and PowerPoint slides about human rights in China for use in their own rhetorical presentations.

At the same time, Amnesty is promoting a much less obviously didactic online human rights initiative at feelthedream.org, which commemorates this week's anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech of Martin Luther King, Jr. but uses music fandom to establish common ground. Unlike Amnesty's traditional letter-writing campaigns, participants are told that "all you are being asked to do is put your hands up, and join others doing the same across the world to celebrate freedom & great music."

Selling the Sizzle Not the Steak

There's been a lot of news about new music distribution models this month. Google announced a fully developed mp3 search functionality for Chinese customers. (Screenshots are here, since the site itself seems to be down.) As the Wall Street Journal explains in "Google Aims to Crack China with Music Push," the corporation is trying to gain market share from the more popular Baidu search engine in a venture that would be capitalized by ad revenue and would promise to promote "legal" downloading with the cooperative Top100.cn music vendor.
At the same time Microsoft and Federated Media are touting the launch of CrowdFire in the United States to figure out an economic model for skimming profit from fan culture in a post-song-sale music marketing era. CrowdFire describes itself as a "celebration of live music" that is "built by you." It claims that its platform is designed for "uploading, sharing, and producing" music, as well as for "mixing, mashing, and melding." All around San Francisco, billboards trumpet the first event, OutsideLands in Golden Gate Park.
See John Battelle for more.

Where There's Smoke (and Mirrors) There's Fireworks

Virtualpolitik pal David Folkenflik reported for NPR about the computer graphics used in seemingly "live" Olympics coverage of the spectacles in the opening ceremony in Live From Beijing: Computer-Enhanced Fireworks. Although the digital effects artists who had worked on the footage for almost a year included elements of cinéma vérité such as camera shake in a faux helicopter shot, my husband Mel Horan, a twenty-year veteran of the themed entertainment business, wasn't fooled for a second. He instantly noticed the tell-tale lack of smoke that is the usual calling card of pyrotechnic displays.

The parent company of Olympics broadcaster NBC, General Electric boasts of its sponsorship of the games and its role providing everything from engineering help with transportation and lighting for the facilities to high-tech medical equipment for the athletes. During the swimming events at the Water Cube the corporation also touts its digital effects technologies that show the country represented by swimmers in each lane and the world record mark to beat with more obvious forms of augmented reality.

Thanks to Vivian Folkenflik for the link.

Able to Leap Tall Buildings in a Single Bound

In honor of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Google Earth now includes 3-D models of the important athletic sites for the events. See more of Google's homage, complete with medal count, here.

Power to the People or Power to the Pixels

The mass-games style use of thousands on extras on the field in the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympics caused considerable commentary about the relationship between human actors who served as pixels and the digital imagery of the spectacle, shown on the giant LED screen, which was unrolled like a traditional scroll on the field, and projected on a giant scrim overhead. In terms of visual culture, it is interesting to think about mass spectacles before the television era. How far did composite images created by fans in stadium sports predate the screens that relied on discrete dots of color to create an image?

Update: Check out what Lev Manovich has to say about the "augmented architecture" and "archbody media" here

English Names

SexyBeijing largely markets itself as a language learning and cultural immersion site with information about Chinese customs for American expatriates and other visitors from abroad. This segment about "English names," which is produced by a company called Goldmines, uses a man-on-the-street interviewing style that is borrowed from broadcast television.

Apples and Oranges

To illustrate a point about how the Chinese world view may be shaped by search engines from proprietary software companies that are cooperating with the government by filtering results, the classic example is Figure A and Figure B, which show competing visions for the term Tiananmen Square. This rhetorical device was used most recently in a blog at the New York Times. It's interesting to note that even the screened results bring up some potentially subversive content, however.

Paintbrush Preacher

Pastor and political protester Eddie Romero has created a number of YouTube videos in which he paints anti-government murals in post Beijing hotel rooms to protest Chinese treatment of evangelical Christians and other anti-Communist dissidents. His videos also pay homage to a particular genre on YouTube that garners views: the speeded up art-creation video.

Romero's bio claims that in his youth, he and his wife "experimented regularly with drugs and we were both spiritually lost." But Romero, a Southern California local, apparently also teaches philosophy in the area. According to his students on his RateMyProfessor page, he gets high marks as a teacher.

Romero's videos now link to the "Gadfly project" at Exodus8one.org. As Romero explains his rationale on the website, it almost comes off like some kind of an alternate reality game with titles that include cryptic headings like "Story Emerges from a Shroud of Mystery."

Supporters describe Romero as currently in hiding, although he is likely to eventually face consequences for hsi acts of vandalism.